Your Fault: The Climate Is Changing So Fast It’s A New World Every Day

I heard you took a long shower, drove your fossil fueled vehicle to work, than had a horrible cheeseburger delivered to work with a big sugary drink, then drove home and cracked open a carbon pollution infused beer, which is causing the climate to change every day

How Fast Is the Climate Changing?: It’s a New World, Each and Every Day

The struggle over climate change is necessarily political and economic and noisy—if we’re going to get anything done, we’ll have to do it in parliaments and stock exchanges, and quickly.

But, every once in a while, it’s worth stepping back and reminding ourselves what’s actually going on, silently, every hour of every day. And what’s going on is that we’re radically remaking our planet, in the course of a human lifetime. Hell, in the course of a human adolescence.

We get a sense of what that feels like when we have a week like the one we just came through. Hurricane Laura detonated in intensity in a few hours before it made landfall—that escalation was one of the most rapid that has ever been observed in the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s because of the extra heat that’s available. That sudden burst of fury is becoming more likely, the experts explain, precisely because there’s more energy stored in the ever-warmer ocean, ready to be converted into howling wind and surging tide. As the Washington Post reported, some experts say that “it is almost as if as the maximum ‘speed limit’ for storms increases, the storms themselves, like drivers, are adjusting by speeding up.” Sometimes we get comparatively lucky, as we did with Laura—it poured most of its power into the wildlife refuges and the marshes along the Louisiana-Texas border. Only about three per cent of the planet’s land surface, after all, is urbanized, so the odds are with you most of the time. And physics, of course, is agnostic—a storm goes where it goes.

See, strong hurricanes never happened till you decided to buy a $21,000 Civic instead of a $135,000 Tesla.

Floods and fires are obvious and dramatic. But this extra energy is expressing itself every second of every hour, usually quietly; you may not notice it, but eventually an ice shelf collapses or a heavy downpour turns into a monster flood. It’s relentless, and it means that we live in a new world, newer all the time. For almost all of human history, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide stuck at about two hundred and seventy-five parts per million, meaning that the planet’s energy balance was essentially unchanged.

I’d mention that multiple Holocene warm periods were actually warmer than today while that “energy balance was essentially unchanged”, but, hey, why start with facts now? I’m just going to demonize you for washing and drying your clothes with machines and keeping your air conditioning at a cool 72. Heretic! You must comply!